89% Fewer Emissions: How Ordit's Zero-Emission Bike Fleet Changes the ESG Case for Corporate Food

Every corporate food delivery platform in London generates carbon emissions. The question is how many, and whether that figure appears on your Scope 3 emissions report.

For most organisations, employee meal programmes sit outside the scope of sustainability reporting. The emissions from delivery motorcycles and vans are attributed to the platform, not the corporate client. The carbon cost of ordering lunch is invisible — which makes it easy to ignore.

Most Ordit orders are delivered on its own fleet of e-bikes, electric cargo bikes and pushbikes, ridden by Ordit’s dedicated riders rather than a gig network, with vans for the largest orders. We are not aware of another corporate food platform in London running the same model. Measured across that bike fleet between Q1 2023 and Q2 2024, it averaged 25 to 31 grams of CO2 per kilometre against the 254.76g diesel van benchmark: an 89% reduction. Over the same period the bike fleet emitted 3,293 kg of CO2 in total and avoided roughly 27 tonnes.

For organisations with net-zero commitments, B Corp certification, or ESG reporting requirements, the choice of food delivery platform is no longer a procurement decision that sits outside the sustainability conversation.

Where food delivery emissions come from

To understand why Ordit's emissions profile is so different, it helps to understand where delivery emissions come from in a conventional platform.

Food delivery at scale, the model used by Just Eat for Business and Deliveroo for Work, relies on a network of individual gig-economy riders and drivers, each making one delivery at a time, using personal motorcycles, cars, or e-bikes. Each delivery dispatched in isolation means each vehicle travels to a restaurant, picks up one order, and delivers it to one address. The individual journey is short. Multiplied by thousands of orders across hundreds of addresses, the cumulative emissions are substantial.

The vehicle mix matters too. Gig-economy platforms have no control over whether their riders use electric bikes, petrol motorcycles, or diesel cars. The platform can report averages; it cannot guarantee emissions per order.

Ordit's model is different in two ways. First, it uses cargo bikes — electrically-assisted, zero-emission, ULEZ-compliant, able to carry multiple orders in a single journey. Second, it uses group delivery: for group orders, all meals for a company or building travel together and are delivered in one trip. Multiple orders, one vehicle, one journey.

This is not a marginal improvement. It is a structural difference in how food delivery works.

The emissions numbers

Ordit measured its bike fleet against the standard diesel van benchmark over Q1 2023 to Q2 2024. These are measured intensities, not modelled averages:

Across that period the bike fleet emitted 3,293 kg of CO2 in total, against roughly 30 tonnes had the same distance run on diesel vans. Net effect: 27 tonnes avoided, an 89% reduction.

Two structural factors drive that result, and both matter if you are going to put the number in a disclosure. The first is vehicle intensity: a cargo bike is about an eighth of a van per kilometre. The second is batching. A group order for a whole floor travels as one journey rather than forty journeys on forty mopeds, so the per-meal figure falls again as the group grows.

Ordit can produce per-account figures for a reporting year on request, so the number that goes into your disclosure reflects your deliveries rather than a market average.

ULEZ and the London regulatory context

London's Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) has covered all of Greater London since August 2023, making it the largest clean air zone in Europe. Within the boundary, vehicles that do not meet the emissions standard (broadly pre-Euro 6 diesel, pre-Euro 4 petrol, pre-Euro 3 motorcycles) pay a daily charge. Bikes of any kind fall outside the scheme entirely.

For a corporate food platform operating in Central London, the ULEZ creates a structural cost advantage for zero-emission delivery: every order that Ordit delivers by cargo bike avoids the charge that an equivalent motorcycle or van delivery would incur. That cost advantage is built into Ordit's pricing.

More significantly for corporate clients, the ULEZ expansion reflects the direction of London's transport policy. The city is moving toward zero-emission delivery networks over the medium term. Suppliers who are building zero-emission operations now are ahead of that direction; those still dependent on petrol vehicles will face increasing regulatory and cost pressure.

The ESG reporting dimension

For organisations with formal ESG reporting — TCFD, GRI, or internal net-zero frameworks — the question of whether employee meal programmes appear in Scope 3 emissions is increasingly relevant.

Scope 3 emissions cover all indirect emissions in the value chain, which includes purchased services. A point of precision that trips up a lot of UK reporting decks: the CSRD is an EU directive and does not apply to UK-only businesses. The UK route is different. Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) already requires large UK companies to report Scope 1 and 2 energy and emissions, with Scope 3 voluntary, and the UK Sustainability Reporting Standards (UK SRS), based on the ISSB's IFRS S1 and S2, are the direction of travel for mandatory climate disclosure including material Scope 3. UK businesses with EU operations may still be caught by CSRD on top. Whichever regime applies to you, purchased food delivery sits in Scope 3 category 1, and it is easier to report when the supplier can hand you the figure.

Ordit provides clients with:

• Per-account annual emissions data (total CO2 for all deliveries in the reporting year)
• Comparative data showing equivalent emissions under conventional delivery
• Scope 3 reporting notes in the format required by standard ESG frameworks

This data is available from Ordit's account management team and can be incorporated into annual ESG reporting with no additional work from the client.

Cargo bikes and the employee experience

Sustainability is the structural argument for Ordit's cargo bike fleet. The employee experience argument is different and equally compelling.

Cargo bikes arrive quietly. They do not create noise in building reception areas or disturb tenants in shared office buildings. They do not require loading bays or vehicle access arrangements. They navigate London's dense streets more efficiently than vans, arriving more reliably within the delivery window.

For the building managers, facilities teams, and reception staff at Central London offices — where delivery management is a constant operational challenge — a food platform that delivers on cargo bikes without the noise, congestion, and access issues of van delivery is a meaningfully different experience.

Several Ordit clients in managed office buildings in the City and Canary Wharf have specifically noted that the cargo bike model was a factor in the building manager's agreement to allow regular food deliveries — a factor that van-delivery platforms could not match.

The competitive context

The alternatives all run the gig-economy network model: individual riders, mixed vehicle types, one delivery at a time. Just Eat for Business (formerly City Pantry) and Uber Eats for Business both work this way, as does Deliveroo for Work, now part of DoorDash following the acquisition that completed in October 2025 and which piloted a London office catering service with a third-party courier partner in March 2026. Handing the last mile to a courier network is precisely the point at which control over the vehicle, and therefore over the emissions figure, is lost.

For organisations whose sustainability commitments extend to their supply chain, and B Corp certification increasingly requires exactly this, the practical test is simple: can the supplier tell you what your deliveries emitted, and does it control the vehicle that produced the figure? Ordit can answer both because the riders ride only for Ordit and it owns the bikes.

This is not a marginal differentiation. It is a clear, verifiable, quantified distinction that Ordit can demonstrate and that no competitor can match today.

Starting the conversation

Ordit's team works with Sustainability, HR, and Procurement teams at organisations with ESG commitments to configure food programmes that are consistent with net-zero strategies and can contribute to Scope 3 reporting.